RapidShare labels piracy report ‘absurd’

RapidShare has blasted a report characterising the file-hosting site as a home for pirated content. Researchers from MarkMonitor crawled the Internet for sites offering counterfeit and pirated digital content tied to 22 high-profile brands. The results included 43 websites classified as digital piracy sites. An additional 48 sites were identified as selling counterfeit goods.

One of those 43 sites was RapidShare, which MarkMonitor cited as one of the top three digital piracy sites, with the other two being megavideo.com and megaupload.com. To fit the ‘digital piracy’ classification, the domain needed to offer or point to one or more of the brands used in the digital content portion of the study for free.

But in a statement, RapidShare called MarkMonitor’s characterisation “absurd.” “RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers.”

“Apart from getting wrong what the company’s business model is, there are some serious questions about the study’s methodology,” RapidShare continued. “For example, the authors conclude that RapidShare has to be the biggest digital piracy site from looking at the number of page visits, totally ignoring the fact that millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes.”